Shults, Wilbur (Dub)

ORAL HISTORY OF WILBUR (DUB) SHULTS
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
October 18, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is October 18, 2012. And I am sitting in my office with Mr. Dub Shults. Mr. Shults, thanks for taking time to talk with us.
MR. SHULTS: Thanks for inviting me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Why don't we start at the beginning? Tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family.
MR. SHULTS: Well, I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was raised in a railroad family. My dad worked 43 years with the Southern Railway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: And that was a great place for a young person to be, because I got to play around and go to the shops, ride on the engines, see him at work. And I learned lots of lessons there and had a good time. And I worked there myself actually when I was in high school and later for college, in the summers I worked there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what did he do? Did he work in the shop?
MR. SHULTS: Yes. Well, he was an electrician originally, but he became a manager.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: And that's a good question, because the railroad in those days, when a person got promoted they moved them to a different city, a different job to get away from the people they had been working with then. So we moved around quite a bit. My family moved about ten times in a period of 14 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. SHULTS: Which meant that I was in several different school systems.
MR. MCDANIEL: But was it all in the South or all in the --
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, actually we lived in several states around the South, but never in Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. My dad was from this area himself.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, was he?
MR. SHULTS: And actually my ancestors came to East Tennessee and are buried up in Cosby now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. SHULTS: And I've been up to see their graves. I'm a seven generation from those people. They immigrated over from Germany.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. But you grew up in Atlanta, you said?
MR. SHULTS: No, I was born in Atlanta.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, born in Atlanta.
MR. SHULTS: And I was in and out of Atlanta. Most of the time when he got promoted we would go to another city and then we would come back to Atlanta.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now do you have brothers and sisters?
MR. SHULTS: I have four brothers, one of whom is deceased, and so I have three living brothers now, all younger than I am.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what year were you born?
MR. SHULTS: 1929.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1929. So you can kind of remember the war. I mean, you know, you were --
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Oh yeah, World War II.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were a teen - yeah, a teenager.
MR. SHULTS: Well, I wasn't quite - I don't think I was quite there, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: You were a pre-teen.
MR. SHULTS: But we happened to be in Atlanta during that period some, and I was an assistant to a warden that walked around the neighborhoods, you know, air raid warden.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Ten years old or so. And we just walked around Atlanta and told people to pull their shades.
MR. MCDANIEL: But that's an exciting job for ten years old.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, actually I was a little bit too young to get in the war. But it had a lot of influence on my life, I have to say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. SHULTS: Because when I got out of high school and tried to go to college it was at a time when many, many veterans were coming back, and so I had a little difficulty getting into college. I graduated from high school in Greenville, South Carolina, and we moved there when I was about 12 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: No, that's not right. About 14 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: To Greenville?
MR. SHULTS: To Greenville, South Carolina. And that was a life-changing move. I've had several life-changing events, and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Well tell me about that one.
MR. SHULTS: --this one. I had, in Atlanta in junior high school, the culture in that high school was not professional; people weren't oriented towards professional.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: They were working people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: And that's the way I was headed in junior high school. And if I hadn't left Atlanta at that time I probably would have worked for the railroad when I was grown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So we moved to Greenville, and that high school had an entirely different culture; it was people who were expected to go to college and get trained and either take over a family business or become a professional person. So it changed my whole outlook. I loved Greenville - I still love Greenville High School. Now when I got there, though, it was an 11-grade high school, and so they questioned whether - what grade I should go into.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And my family - my parents and I went and talked with the principal and he said, "Okay, we'll try him in his regular grade, and if he can make it we'll leave him there. Otherwise we may have to move him back." Well, I made it. And the result was I graduated after 11 years from high school at 16 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh wow.
MR. SHULTS: That was good and bad, because as I said just a minute ago, when I tried to go to college I was competing with people that had been in the Army for three or four years and 25 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: And so I had a hard time getting in college. I got turned down right at first.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. SHULTS: Emory University.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: So at age 16 I went to work in a bank, First National Bank of Atlanta, as a gofer. You know, I ran errands and rolled up money and so on, counted money. Well, I got a letter after about six months saying I'd been accepted to Emory. And I told my dad I didn't want to go. I mean I didn't need to go; I was making $25.00 a week. And he said, "Well, son, you don't have to go. But if your decision is to make your own way then you've got to pay me some rent. And you have to get your own car; you can't use my car and you can't ride the pass on the railroad anymore." And pretty soon he convinced me I ought to go to college. So I did. And I graduated in 1946 and I got a scholarship and went another year and got a Master's degree in chemistry. That's what I wound up majoring in.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were in college during the war, weren't you?
MR. SHULTS: No, the war was about over.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, it was about over. But so you went - sorry --
MR. SHULTS: '46. I was in college from '46 to '50.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. I see. Yeah, from '46 to '50.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you ended up getting your Master's degree from Emory University?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now were you married? Did you get married while you were in college?
MR. SHULTS: Well, no, not while I was in college. But while I was in graduate school there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you? Okay.
MR. SHULTS: See, when we had moved from Greenville back to Atlanta then I met this girl, met her at church actually. And her name was Sue Fagan, Suereta Jean Fagan. And we met her at church - we met each other at church and we began to go together, and we went together after that for years, up until today actually.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go. There you go.
MR. SHULTS: We'll be - we will have been married 62 years in December.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: But to answer your question, what we - we got married after my first quarter in graduate school, at Christmastime.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And the response in the Chemistry Department was interesting; I came back and announced that I got married during Christmas break, and one of the professors says, "Well, I guess that means you're not going to Princeton." Turns out he was a Princeton man.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: And I hadn't even thought about going to Princeton. So we, Sue and I went on some interviews and so on, and then we - I wound up coming up here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: So I came to work up here October 1, 1951.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. With your Master's degree, that's what you had?
MR. SHULTS: Yes. Yeah, that's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: October 1951?
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now who did you interview with and what job did you have?
MR. SHULTS: Well, I was interviewed by the Division Director for Analytical Chemistry at ORNL, his name was Myron Kelley.
MR. MCDANIEL: Excuse me. Excuse me just a minute; let me get that. I'll edit this out. I forgot that my wife put one of these phones in here. [Unrelated Conversation] Okay, so we'll get back to - I'll ask you that question again, about so who did you interview with and what job did you get in Oak Ridge?
MR. SHULTS: I interviewed - the main person I interviewed - of course you interview with several people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But the main one I interviewed was a man named Myron Kelley. Dr. Myron Kelley was the Director of Analytical Chemistry Division up here. And so I interviewed him and several of the supervisors in that division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And they made me an offer, and for the first time I began - I moved up here and lived in Tennessee, where my parents - where my ancestors had come from.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: Kind of interesting.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you said this was '51?
MR. SHULTS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: '51.
MR. SHULTS: The training I had had at Emory didn't prepare me to come to Oak Ridge National Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: No, it was - they taught us conventional chemistry. So for example, if you wanted to measure a liquid you slurped it into a tube and you let it out to a mark and then you let it go. That tube is a pipette. When you come up here, I found there's no slurping in Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so I had to relearn - I had to learn for the first time how to do a lot of things, how to deal with small, tiny amounts of materials and how to handle radioactivity and live with it, and so on. So the first job I had was assigned into a radiochemistry lab which didn't have very much work to do. And I practiced all day long pipetting and that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? Right.
MR. SHULTS: Well, after about three months in that job, as I said, they didn't have anything much to do at that time. So I finagled around to get an interview with the Division Director, a meeting with him, and looking back at it, that was maybe a dangerous thing to do, but I went to him and I told him, "Dr. Kelley, we don't have very much work to do, and I'd just like you to know that if you'd like to move me to another group then I'd be pleased to go."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: Well, about three days later I got moved. He moved me over to a lab in Homogenous Reactor experiment. There was a little analytical laboratory in the building that supported that reactor development, and that was a big project at the Lab at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: It was a shift work job, but that's okay; I didn't even think about that in those days. So that was my job, was to run samples in that lab in support of their experiments at the reactor. And that resulted in the most exciting time I ever had at the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: Because I happened to be at work the night the thing first went critical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: And so it was really exciting. I mean they had worked for years, several years building and they were going - it was a proof of concept that night, and they had a lot of big wheels come. And there was a guy named Winters who was a vice president of something at Union Carbide who came and he sat at the control panel and over the PA system and he would say "Raise control to notch two" or something like that. And it would, and you could see the radio-activity levels going up on a chart.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And it would go up and it would go back down. And he'd say, "Raise it to level four" and it would go up higher, and they would take the control rod out and it would go back down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And finally it went up to some level and it went up there and they took the control rods out and it kept operating.
MR. MCDANIEL: It just kept - oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: That meant it had gone critical right then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: And there was all this whooping and hollering going on. And I remember Alvin Weinberg brought champagne out, then completely illegal, but there was a celebration. And man, I'm telling you, that was an exciting night.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'll bet. I'll bet it was. I'll bet it was.
MR. SHULTS: And that was, as I said, probably the most exciting thing that happened to me out there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now when you first came to Oak Ridge in '51, now where did you live?
MR. SHULTS: I lived on Waddell Circle in a K-apartment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. SHULTS: Oh yeah. In those days, you know, we had a guy come in and stoke the furnace in the middle of the night.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: You put cheesecloth over the vents so that the soot didn't blow out too badly in the rooms and things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But it wasn't bad for a newly married couple.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And we enjoyed living there. And it was not a bad neighborhood then. It's kind of gone down since then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now where is Waddell?
MR. SHULTS: It's up, you know where the Children's Museum is?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
MR. SHULTS: Okay. It's down towards Pennsylvania Avenue, about a block or two from there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. I understand.
MR. SHULTS: Just past Hillside.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, right. Exactly. I know where those - I know where that would be.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. And that was an okay place until I got drafted.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, tell me about that. So you were here - you got here in '51 and you worked here for how many years?
MR. SHULTS: Well, part of the reason I came up here was because I thought I wouldn't get drafted, that's the first thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: But when the Lab decided it was no longer going to request deferments for people, they didn't just decide and start doing it that way; what they did is they wrote the draft board and said, "We no longer need this guy." So I was gone in about a month, and that was in 1955.
MR. MCDANIEL: '55.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, they --
MR. MCDANIEL: So you'd been here almost - about four years or so.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, 3.5 or so years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. SHULTS: It was in March, March 15th actually. And that was another change in my life, to say the least.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. And you were, I mean, you know, you weren't just some guy right out of high school that went into the service; you were married and had a career and you were well into your 20s.
MR. SHULTS: Well, I didn't have any kids. Yeah, we were married, but I didn't have any kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: And so it was kind of an interesting time. They sent me down to Fort Jackson for basic training. And the result of that was I got orders to report to Denver, Colorado. I'd never been west of the Mississippi. I was standing around saying, "Holy mackerel, I'm going to Denver." Then somebody else says, "Are you nuts? That's a wonderful place."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And it was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. SHULTS: You know, those 2 years, 2.5 I spent in the Army were terrific.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were they?
MR. SHULTS: They really were. I worked in a nerve gas plant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. SHULTS: -- that was operated by the Army.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: Doing chemical work. And not much work actually. The plant didn't run very much, for one reason or another, broken down most of the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: Though I had - there were some scary times in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, there really were. When you went in and out of the cells where the machinery was you had to put on a rubber suit and go through a shower to get in there and get out. And a guy, one of the Army people, private probably, bent over to pick up a wrench, and some dropped down his - the back of his rubber suit.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh goodness.
MR. SHULTS: And of course you shoot him with Atropine and do the best you can and rush him off.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: He was in the hospital about three months and then discharged.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Ruined.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness.
MR. SHULTS: But I said it didn't run much. I'm beginning to get wound up here, Keith.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.
MR. SHULTS: You're going to have to slow me down.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.
MR. SHULTS: Since it didn't run much, and since I was working nights a lot of the time, a couple things happened that were great. One is I started playing golf, and that's my main game.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And the other thing is that we got to tour all around the West.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Not just around the Rocky Mountains there, which we did often, and go look for ghost towns and all kinds of things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But I took a 30-day leave and we hit every national park out west while we were out there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: I would've never had that kind of experience if I'd just stayed at work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: And so I look back on my Army days as great days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now did your work in the Army benefit you as far as your skill goes, your chemical [skill]?
MR. SHULTS: Not really.
MR. MCDANIEL: Not really?
MR. SHULTS: Uh-uh.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: It was strictly, I was like a technician in a lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Technician, sure. Now when you finished your tour of duty what happened? Did you come back to Oak Ridge?
MR. SHULTS: Yes, I did. Now I did interview a few places. Rocky Flats was one of them actually.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. SHULTS: But I came back to the Lab. The Lab had saved a job for me. It wasn't exactly the same job, but it was a good job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I came back and I was in what's called a development group; it's sort of a research group.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what year did you come back, '50?
MR. SHULTS: '57.
MR. MCDANIEL: '57, okay.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were in a development group there at the Lab.
MR. SHULTS: There's one thing, I guess a slight diversion, but I said I started playing golf. About 13 days before I was supposed to be discharged I was playing golf on the Fitzsimmons Army Hospital Golf Course, and had a heart attack.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: And I was 27 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my goodness.
MR. SHULTS: And in those days heart attacks were a lot more serious than they are today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: That's not to say they're not.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But they didn't have the same skills and knowledge then, so I wound up spending three days out of - they put me to sleep to let me rest, in an oxygen tent for three days, before I ever woke up. When I woke up I had three golf balls in my back pocket all that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. SHULTS: And the nurse said, "You sure are fragrant." But I came back to work and I've had a very normal life.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do they know what caused it?
MR. SHULTS: No. One of the physicians brought in a book, a medical book, and in it it says heart attacks occur to people over 30 years old, and I was 27.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, of course. Twenty-seven.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: What do you think caused it? Do you think it had anything to do with your work?
MR. SHULTS: No. It was a fluke. I think everybody has some blood clots floating around in their system and, you know, the coronary arteries are really, really tiny. And so it wouldn't take much. And I just think it was a fluke.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just a fluke.
MR. SHULTS: But I had good doctors here and in Knoxville, super doctors.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you came back after your heart attack, after you got discharged, came back to Oak Ridge to work, and you were telling me you got put in a development group, which is kind of a research group.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah, I did. And that's another landmark event, I guess I would call it, because in that group there was a man that was sort of my hero; my boss was named Paul Thomas, and he was a very likeable, easygoing, but very competent guy. And so he's sort of my mentor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I got to do development work and research and I got to write papers and reports. And that's not always the case; that was very fortunate. That was a blessing in a way.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: Well, after I'd been in that group for five or six years, one day I got a call to Dr. Kelley’s office. He said, "Have you ever thought about going back to school?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I said, "Well, sure." And they said, "Well, the AEC is developing a scholarship program and they're going to send people back to get their PhDs at no expense. I mean they're going to pay your salary and all this while you're gone, if you go. There's no guarantee that you'll get this, but we'll nominate you if you want us to."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I said, "Of course." Now at this point in our life Sue and I had two - had one little girl, one was expected, and we were in our first house that we had bought. We lived in West Knoxville, West Hills.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: So I went home that night. This is a family story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Good. Good. That's - I'm interested in that.
MR. SHULTS: This is what I call Sue's finest hour, 'cause I went home that night, she's standing at the kitchen, washing dishes or something, and I go up behind her and she's pregnant, in our first house. And I say, "What would you say if I said we're going back to school?" She said, "Where are we going?" just like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just like that.
MR. SHULTS: No problem. So we had to sell that house, but we didn't know for sure that we were going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so we put an ad in the paper and this retired couple came along and said, "We'll buy your house." And I said, "Well, there's a little problem, I don't know for sure that I'm leaving yet." And if you know how AEC and DOE works, it just delays and delays and delays.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I explained that to them and they said, "That's okay. We don't mind." And so about two weeks before we were to go I got called in and said, "Okay, you've been approved." And so we had to --
MR. MCDANIEL: Move everything.
MR. SHULTS: -- get going. We had to get going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: Now in the meantime we had gone off on interviews to different schools to make the decisions where we were going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, where to go.
MR. SHULTS: And I had put a deposit down on student apartments up at Indiana - I went to Indiana University.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I had made all the arrangements anyhow.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So we jumped through the hoops, sold the house, packed up and moved to Bloomington, Indiana.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. SHULTS: And I was about 30 years, 31 years old. That was another landmark.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: I had been out of school about ten years and I was competing with guys who were ten years younger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. It was just the opposite of the way it was when you got out of high school, wasn't it?
MR. SHULTS: It was exactly. Well, almost exactly, yeah. Goodness gracious. And the first semester, was it - yeah, they were on the semester system at the time - I had to work pretty hard
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And in fact, I was dragging - I had to learn things that I had never had before. I had to be re-learning things and learning new things and things that those guys in the class had had last year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: On the other hand, I had ten years of experience too, so I had something going for me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. Sure, exactly.
MR. SHULTS: But after about three months there I was worried that maybe I'd made a bad mistake.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: Because I could imagine, "What if I flunk out?"
MR. MCDANIEL: That would be horrible.
MR. SHULTS: Having this scholarship, I won't be able to go back to the Lab; my whole life is ruined.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But it did work out and I wound up being very successful. And I came back to the Lab then and did my research at the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: For your thesis?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And so --
MR. MCDANIEL: And so what year did you come back to do that? You were there what, a year?
MR. SHULTS: It was about '62 I went - I think it was '62 I went up there, came back in '64, got the degree in '66.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: The postman delivered the degree for me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. We were living in the Garden Apartments, and by that time we had a third child on the way, and I didn't go up to any graduation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And you've been here ever since, right?
MR. SHULTS: Yep, ever since.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the last time you moved back to Oak Ridge, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: That's right. Yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, well good.
MR. SHULTS: And all the time I've been gone - the only time I - well, those assignments were one thing, but we did move to West Hills for one year out of that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But no, I'm an Oak Ridger, no doubt about it, through and through.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Well let's finish up kind of your career, and then I want to go back and talk about your community, your life in the community, in Oak Ridge.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you stayed at the Lab, you came back and got a job at the Lab. So kind of take me, you know, five or ten minutes and kind of talk about until your retirement.
MR. SHULTS: Well, when I came back I was in a research group again. But shortly after that they made me a group leader of another research group, kind of small. And we did some interesting things; we had a tobacco smoke program there that was one of the earliest ones in the country --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: --where we studied the chemicals in tobacco and tobacco smoke. And in conjunction with the people in the Biology Division, we studied the impact of that smoke. And when people saw what came out of those cigarettes it helped a lot of people quit smoking.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I bet. I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did.
MR. SHULTS: Although we had one technician in the program who never quit.
MR. MCDANIEL: Never quit?
MR. SHULTS: Golly. And I remember seeing him one day in the restroom, he came in and smoked a cigarette through a hole in his throat.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Oh my goodness.
MR. SHULTS: It was awful. So sometime, I don't know how many years now, but I was promoted up above, to what's called an Assistant Division Director. I guess I was Assistant Division Director first, and then I was Associate Division Director, and then I became a Division Director in 1976.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: I think. '74 or '76.
MR. MCDANIEL: The mid-'70s, something like that.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah. And that's where I was the rest of my life out there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. When did you retire?
MR. SHULTS: 1994, end of '94.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. So you were a Division Director about 20 years or so.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, almost.
MR. MCDANIEL: Almost, yeah.
MR. SHULTS: And it was a great job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. And I think I helped them, but they helped me too. I mean just being associated with ORNL is a plus in one's career. But I wound up being active in the American Chemical Society and I was head of its Division of Analytical Chemistry. ACS is the biggest professional society in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. It has something like 130,000 members.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. SHULTS: And it's organized into divisions that are related to the discipline.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So there was one for Division of Analytical Chemistry, and I was head of that. And during - it's the usual things that people do, you know, I was on an editorial boards and things like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But I met and became friends with people, you know, all around the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, I got to do things that a railroad person wouldn't get to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I was about to say you came a long way from that railroad job.
MR. SHULTS: Oh shoot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's go back and talk a little bit about your family and your life in the community of Oak Ridge. Let's start with when you came back, you know, the final time you came back to Oak Ridge, after you got your - you know, working on your doctorate. By this time you had three children, and I'm sure, you know, you kind of got entrenched in the community at that point, you know, started - of course, you know, when you have three kids there's not a whole lot of time between that and work. There's not a lot of time to do other things, but I'm sure you found some time.
MR. SHULTS: Well, one of the things that were big in our life at that stage was the Oak Ridge Civic Ballet Association.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: I had two girls; they're older. The boy is younger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. SHULTS: Both of them, both of the girls were in the ballet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? Okay.
MR. SHULTS: The civic ballet in Oak Ridge at that time was terrific, for a small town particularly.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so my wife and I both got into it. My wife made costumes and all of that stuff and wound up being chairman of their board for a year or two and things like that. My job, I worked on the productions.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. SHULTS: In fact, was production manager for several of them. And I made sets and I made props and I did all kinds of things like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I've told our girls, "You gave us a lot." I said, "We gave you something, but you gave us a lot too." That is another change in our lives. My kids grew up with an appreciation for music and for dance and things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I was in several of them, actually. So you've got more performances than I do, but we've both been there.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's right. That's right.
MR. SHULTS: It's kind of funny, I think about this a lot, when we were going to do one, I think it was Coppelia, and they had the cast in position with a scrim in front, and you're standing there, knowing it's about to open, and you can't help but get a little bit nervous.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure.
MR. SHULTS: And a lot of funny things happened. And that was just the greatest thing, the greatest experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, Oak Ridge has always, from the beginning has always been - had really good cultural activities for its residents.
MR. SHULTS: It does. Yeah, it does.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, the ballet and the orchestra and the Playhouse and things such as that, you know.
MR. SHULTS: Sure. It's amazing, isn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: It is amazing for such a small town.
MR. SHULTS: Well, the ballet - I don't - not very many small towns have a civic ballet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh no.
MR. SHULTS: I know you can take ballet dancing classes and things. One of my daughters was very, very good. In fact, she competed at the state level. There was a ballet that celebrated the something-or-other anniversary of Knoxville, like the 200th or 150th anniversary or something. So she won the lead in that thing and she danced on the civic center stage in Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Wow.
MR. SHULTS: But I had to learn a few --
MR. MCDANIEL: Can you pirouette?
MR. SHULTS: I had to - in one of my roles, in The Nutcracker, was the grandfather.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. SHULTS: Kind of funny too; I saw a picture of me made up for that role, looks like me today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Looks like you now?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny.
MR. SHULTS: But yeah, I had to learn a little dance step there for that one.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: And believe me, I practiced and practiced.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now were you all involved in any other activities like that? Or maybe not to that degree, but --
MR. SHULTS: That was the main one, main one. But my - well, my son, he didn't care for ballet too much.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: He actually was on stage one time, though. And after that, when he was 10 maybe, and as soon as it was over he says, "Dad, I'll never do that again." But he was on the golf team at the high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I was about to say, you're a big - you know, your love of golf, has it lasted through the years?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, we still play.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: I have a group that plays on Tuesdays and Thursdays when it can.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And we are not very good anymore. We never were really good, but we have a good time.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's beside the point, isn't it?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: Actually we've moved down now to play from what's called the forward tees, that's really the ladies' tees.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I told them the other day, "Man, we're getting to the point where we just - the only thing left is just to quit keeping score."
MR. MCDANIEL: Drive halfway down the green and tee off from there, I guess.
MR. SHULTS: Well, my son was on the golf team and he went to Tennessee Tech and he was on the golf team over there too. So one of the things we wound up doing was following him as much as we could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: One of the things in my life that's unusual, I will mention, related to golf, is that one of my brothers has four tickets to the Masters. He's had them since about 1965.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: And so I've been to every Masters for the past 40 years or so, except this last year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Really?
MR. SHULTS: This year - this year, in April.
MR. MCDANIEL: This year.
MR. SHULTS: And I couldn't go this year because I can't leave Sue for two or three days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Sure. Sure, I understand.
MR. SHULTS: But that has been very unusual.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. SHULTS: They're hard to get.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. SHULTS: Those tickets are the hardest tickets to get of any sporting event.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MR. SHULTS: And we've been able to take friends and just have a great time doing that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, that's great. That's great. Now were you and your - was your wife involved in like groups or is she a member of the Bridge Club or were there organizations she was involved with over the years?
MR. SHULTS: She was primarily the ballet.
MR. MCDANIEL: The ballet.
MR. SHULTS: I mean it was a full-time job.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure. I know.
MR. SHULTS: And as I said, she was the chairman of their board for a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But, you know, we're Methodists and we're involved in the church to some extent. Probably not as much as we should be.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, nobody is probably. Now you did say that you all had seasons tickets to the Playhouse for a long, long time.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, we do that. We go to some of the symphony things, the music things, and up until this year, had season tickets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. SHULTS: And we enjoyed that a lot. But we gave those up this year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well what was it like, you know, living in Oak Ridge and raising a family in Oak Ridge through the past few decades? I mean do you think it was different than any other place?
MR. SHULTS: I was about to say normal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. SHULTS: I think it - normal in the sense of experiences you have.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: Probably more than better in terms of loyalty or interest or something like the spirit maybe.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: You know, Oak Ridge is - it really is a different kind of place. I mean if you make half of an interest, effort, half, then you can have many, many friends; you can do just about anything you want to do. You're living in a place to be proud of it because it accomplished things of worldwide import. And you're around a lot of smart people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. SHULTS: I remember one night when we lived in the Garden Apartments, I went out to go to the car and here comes a Nobel Prize winner walking by, "Good evening."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: You know, it's kind of like a university environment almost.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: It was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: It was.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was.
MR. SHULTS: And so I was very proud of being in Oak Ridge and very proud at being at ORNL too, for that matter.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: But, you know, my wife, she didn't get out in all the clubs and things that she could have, but she did her part in other ways.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well sure, of course.
MR. SHULTS: But I seem to get elected to a lot of things. I kind of don't know how to say no enough.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. SHULTS: But I was president of the country club for three years and things like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Now you've been a long-time Rotary member, haven't you?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Well, about 24 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Twenty-four years.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, the Breakfast Club - there are three clubs in town.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I belong to the - and was president of that club for a while. And I'm treasurer now actually. But yeah, that Rotary Club is wonderful; it has been. Part of the reason it's wonderful is just the people in it. You get acquainted with people of all different kinds of jobs and interests and backgrounds and it's sort of a broadening experience actually just to be a member of that thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But it also does a lot of good things for a lot of people around the world actually.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And in the community, you know.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And the community as well as around the world.
MR. SHULTS: I didn't realize it would be so good when I first joined, but when my son graduated from Tennessee Tech it was just about the time that I got inducted into Rotary. And so Mary Lou Auxier, you interviewed - I think you interviewed John Auxier.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. SHULTS: Mary Lou Auxier at that time is the one who sponsored me into Rotary.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. SHULTS: And in talking about me, introducing the new member, she says, "And just for your information, he has a son who is just graduating in engineering from Tennessee Tech, in case anybody has a job."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: After the meeting Chuck Hall, who was head of engineering for Martin Marietta came up and said, "Have him send me his resume."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: And that's how he got the job.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's just that networking that everybody talks about.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. It's amazing isn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, and people are willing to help, even without you asking.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean that's one of the great things about it.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, it is.
MR. MCDANIEL: But I think that's just kind of a reflection of our community, you know? I mean, you know, I would imagine that that kind of attitude in the Rotary, you know, just a reflection of the people in our community, you know.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah, Rotary, one of its goals is to get a mix of people of different professions, so you all learn it from each other and help each other out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: But that's a living example right there.
MR. MCDANIEL: It sure is. It sure is.
MR. SHULTS: So the nice thing is he stayed in Oak Ridge, and now I've got two little grandkids, one is seven and one is six, who live down the street from me one mile.
MR. MCDANIEL: You can't beat that, can't you?
MR. SHULTS: I mean that's about as good as it gets. So I mean I have friends whose grandkids live in Seattle and, goodness gracious.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But no, we get to know them and they get to know us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. That's true. That's true. Anything else about your life in Oak Ridge that you want to talk about? Did you ever get involved in politics? Were you interested in that?
MR. SHULTS: Well, not to the level of others. But I was a member of the original Environmental Equality Advisory Board.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. SHULTS: I was the charter vice president on that thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. SHULTS: And that - when it first got started that --
MR. MCDANIEL: And what did that do? What did that board do?
MR. SHULTS: Well, that's back in the '70s, when the environment got to be capitalized.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so this was a new board, supposed to represent the citizenry in environmental matters and advise the City Council.
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MR. SHULTS: And so I was involved in that in the early days. It still exists. I'm not sure, you know, exactly what all it does now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But it was --
MR. MCDANIEL: But you never thought of running for City Council or the School Board or anything like that?
MR. SHULTS: Not very long.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. I understand. You thought about it and then you got over it, right? Is that what it was?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess everybody thinks about that at some point, and then they realize.
MR. SHULTS: Well, you know, I appreciate those people doing that, and some of them are good friends of mine. And I'll help them in any way I can, but I really - sad to say, but when I was working I didn't really have time for that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Sure. I understand. I understand.
MR. SHULTS: You know, I guess maybe it sounded like pretty rosy when I was talking about my job and all, but you know, it was a 24/7 job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. It was a good job, it was just very demanding, though, wasn't it?
MR. SHULTS: It was, yeah. You know, there were times when we would have a snow here and everybody would go home and I'd go out, you know, at 7:00 and the cars were still piled up, well, I just spent the night in the office --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: -- instead of trying to go home and come back.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But yeah, it was pretty demanding. I never did think of it much as a job really, though.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was just your life, wasn't it?
MR. SHULTS: It was indeed. That's the way it was. That's the same way my dad was about his job. I don't think my son is quite like that, but he's pretty conscientious, thank goodness.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Well, kids nowadays, you know, they have a different mindset, don't they?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Your son is probably close to my age, so I can't call him a kid probably.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, he's 45.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I'm a little older than him, so. But well, is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything else you want to tell? Any good stories you want to tell on anybody, 'cause here's a good chance?
MR. SHULTS: Really? Can I tell one?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure, absolutely.
MR. SHULTS: Well, I'm going to tell my favorite Clyde Hopkins story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: Clyde and I and --
MR. MCDANIEL: And for people who don't know, tell us who Clyde Hopkins is.
MR. SHULTS: Well, Clyde Hopkins was formerly the president of the Martin Marietta and then Lockheed Martin organizations in Oak Ridge. And at that time it was a unified single contract operation, so he was over Y-12, K-25, X-10, Portsmouth, Paducah, and so on.
MR. MCDANIEL: he was the big cheese, wasn't he?
MR. SHULTS: He was, and he's just a great guy, really, really great guy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And we've been playing golf together maybe for 50 years or so. And we used to go on golf trips. Every year we would go somewhere for three or four days, play golf and eat.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And there was an engineer here named Frank Davis who went with us, and there's a lawyer over in Knoxville named Ed Rayson who went with us. Ed's a bit older than we are.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: So on one of these trips we went over to a place in North Carolina that's sort of a golf resort, and it's in Waynesville, North Carolina. And we had adjacent rooms; Frank and I in one, Clyde and Ed in the other. Now Ed had a little hearing problem; he had to wear hearing aids, which he took out at night.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So there we are, we'd sit around - we'd eat and we would sit around and shoot the bull and then go to bed early so we could get up and play the next day. Well, this night we all went to bed and asleep. And about 3:00 in the morning there's a knock on the door, knock, knock, knock, "Dub. Hey, Dub. Hey, Dub." And it - so I went and I looked through the little hole there, you know, and son of a gun, there's Clyde out there in the dark. Now you've got to picture this; it's dark, but right over him is a light shining down on him like a spotlight, see?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And he's standing out there in his underwear. And so I open the door and he says, "I can't get in my room." He said, "They called me from the office and said my lights were on in the car, and I came out" and he said, "Ed's asleep, he can't hear anything, so I need to get back in my room." And I'm telling you, that scene of Clyde Hopkins standing in the dark in his underwear with the light shining down on him, like from Heaven, I'm telling you, is hilarious.
MR. MCDANIEL: Excuse me. That is funny.
MR. SHULTS: And he paid the price, too. I'll tell you, it went around.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, that's kind of an unusual thing to think of Clyde doing; he's so distinguished, you know.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you'll allow me, I'll tell you my best story about Clyde --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: -- since I've kind of made fun of him.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's fine. Go ahead.
MR. SHULTS: The Rotary Club - I have trouble telling this story. The Rotary Club each year has an angel trees; we pick angels and buy presents for little kids that are underprivileged.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so we did - Clyde and I decided -we gather on the Saturday before Christmas and deliver them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: So we were delivering and one of the little kids had wanted a bicycle, and we had a whole - we had big garbage bags full of toys.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So we go up to this door and Clyde has this bicycle with him that the little kid wanted. And we knock on the door and they come and he said, "We've got this bicycle for you." Another little kid over there says, "I wanted one too."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Clyde says, "We didn't have room for that one in the truck. We'll have to bring it back later."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: He went directly to K-Mart, bought another bicycle, and took it back to that kid.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Now that is a moving story to me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: It says a lot about him, not as president of the company, but he's really a great guy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, good. Good. All right, are we through?
MR. SHULTS: I guess we are, if you don't - you've run out of questions.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, no, no, no. If you've got anything else you want to talk about we can. If not, then that's great; we've been going about an hour.
MR. SHULTS: Well, let me just say this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, go ahead.
MR. SHULTS: When this opportunity came up, as I said a while ago, you can't help but do a little reflection. And when I think back, my life has sort of been a series of things happening at just the right time. It seems like things just fell together for me. You know, I got drafted, but it turned out to be good.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: You know, I had a heart attack, but it turned out to be okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: I got sent back to school- it's unimaginable that I got picked as one of the first three guys to get sent back to school at company expense.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: My major professor up there used to tease me about being the highest-paid graduate student in the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. SHULTS: But things just fell together, it seems. So I just feel like I've had a good life. Really good. And living in Oak Ridge is part of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So thank you for doing this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well thank you very much. I appreciate it and it was great to hear your stories.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[*** Editor’s Note: At the request of Mr. Shults, several corrections have been made to this transcript; however, the video/audio component to this interview is unchanged.***]

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ORAL HISTORY OF WILBUR (DUB) SHULTS
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
October 18, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is October 18, 2012. And I am sitting in my office with Mr. Dub Shults. Mr. Shults, thanks for taking time to talk with us.
MR. SHULTS: Thanks for inviting me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Why don't we start at the beginning? Tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family.
MR. SHULTS: Well, I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and I was raised in a railroad family. My dad worked 43 years with the Southern Railway.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: And that was a great place for a young person to be, because I got to play around and go to the shops, ride on the engines, see him at work. And I learned lots of lessons there and had a good time. And I worked there myself actually when I was in high school and later for college, in the summers I worked there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what did he do? Did he work in the shop?
MR. SHULTS: Yes. Well, he was an electrician originally, but he became a manager.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: And that's a good question, because the railroad in those days, when a person got promoted they moved them to a different city, a different job to get away from the people they had been working with then. So we moved around quite a bit. My family moved about ten times in a period of 14 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. SHULTS: Which meant that I was in several different school systems.
MR. MCDANIEL: But was it all in the South or all in the --
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, actually we lived in several states around the South, but never in Tennessee.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. My dad was from this area himself.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, was he?
MR. SHULTS: And actually my ancestors came to East Tennessee and are buried up in Cosby now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. SHULTS: And I've been up to see their graves. I'm a seven generation from those people. They immigrated over from Germany.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. But you grew up in Atlanta, you said?
MR. SHULTS: No, I was born in Atlanta.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, born in Atlanta.
MR. SHULTS: And I was in and out of Atlanta. Most of the time when he got promoted we would go to another city and then we would come back to Atlanta.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now do you have brothers and sisters?
MR. SHULTS: I have four brothers, one of whom is deceased, and so I have three living brothers now, all younger than I am.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what year were you born?
MR. SHULTS: 1929.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1929. So you can kind of remember the war. I mean, you know, you were --
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Oh yeah, World War II.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were a teen - yeah, a teenager.
MR. SHULTS: Well, I wasn't quite - I don't think I was quite there, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: You were a pre-teen.
MR. SHULTS: But we happened to be in Atlanta during that period some, and I was an assistant to a warden that walked around the neighborhoods, you know, air raid warden.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Ten years old or so. And we just walked around Atlanta and told people to pull their shades.
MR. MCDANIEL: But that's an exciting job for ten years old.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, actually I was a little bit too young to get in the war. But it had a lot of influence on my life, I have to say.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. SHULTS: Because when I got out of high school and tried to go to college it was at a time when many, many veterans were coming back, and so I had a little difficulty getting into college. I graduated from high school in Greenville, South Carolina, and we moved there when I was about 12 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: No, that's not right. About 14 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: To Greenville?
MR. SHULTS: To Greenville, South Carolina. And that was a life-changing move. I've had several life-changing events, and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Well tell me about that one.
MR. SHULTS: --this one. I had, in Atlanta in junior high school, the culture in that high school was not professional; people weren't oriented towards professional.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: They were working people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: And that's the way I was headed in junior high school. And if I hadn't left Atlanta at that time I probably would have worked for the railroad when I was grown.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So we moved to Greenville, and that high school had an entirely different culture; it was people who were expected to go to college and get trained and either take over a family business or become a professional person. So it changed my whole outlook. I loved Greenville - I still love Greenville High School. Now when I got there, though, it was an 11-grade high school, and so they questioned whether - what grade I should go into.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And my family - my parents and I went and talked with the principal and he said, "Okay, we'll try him in his regular grade, and if he can make it we'll leave him there. Otherwise we may have to move him back." Well, I made it. And the result was I graduated after 11 years from high school at 16 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh wow.
MR. SHULTS: That was good and bad, because as I said just a minute ago, when I tried to go to college I was competing with people that had been in the Army for three or four years and 25 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: And so I had a hard time getting in college. I got turned down right at first.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. SHULTS: Emory University.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: So at age 16 I went to work in a bank, First National Bank of Atlanta, as a gofer. You know, I ran errands and rolled up money and so on, counted money. Well, I got a letter after about six months saying I'd been accepted to Emory. And I told my dad I didn't want to go. I mean I didn't need to go; I was making $25.00 a week. And he said, "Well, son, you don't have to go. But if your decision is to make your own way then you've got to pay me some rent. And you have to get your own car; you can't use my car and you can't ride the pass on the railroad anymore." And pretty soon he convinced me I ought to go to college. So I did. And I graduated in 1946 and I got a scholarship and went another year and got a Master's degree in chemistry. That's what I wound up majoring in.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were in college during the war, weren't you?
MR. SHULTS: No, the war was about over.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, it was about over. But so you went - sorry --
MR. SHULTS: '46. I was in college from '46 to '50.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see. I see. Yeah, from '46 to '50.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you ended up getting your Master's degree from Emory University?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now were you married? Did you get married while you were in college?
MR. SHULTS: Well, no, not while I was in college. But while I was in graduate school there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you? Okay.
MR. SHULTS: See, when we had moved from Greenville back to Atlanta then I met this girl, met her at church actually. And her name was Sue Fagan, Suereta Jean Fagan. And we met her at church - we met each other at church and we began to go together, and we went together after that for years, up until today actually.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go. There you go.
MR. SHULTS: We'll be - we will have been married 62 years in December.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: But to answer your question, what we - we got married after my first quarter in graduate school, at Christmastime.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And the response in the Chemistry Department was interesting; I came back and announced that I got married during Christmas break, and one of the professors says, "Well, I guess that means you're not going to Princeton." Turns out he was a Princeton man.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: And I hadn't even thought about going to Princeton. So we, Sue and I went on some interviews and so on, and then we - I wound up coming up here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: So I came to work up here October 1, 1951.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. With your Master's degree, that's what you had?
MR. SHULTS: Yes. Yeah, that's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: October 1951?
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Now who did you interview with and what job did you have?
MR. SHULTS: Well, I was interviewed by the Division Director for Analytical Chemistry at ORNL, his name was Myron Kelley.
MR. MCDANIEL: Excuse me. Excuse me just a minute; let me get that. I'll edit this out. I forgot that my wife put one of these phones in here. [Unrelated Conversation] Okay, so we'll get back to - I'll ask you that question again, about so who did you interview with and what job did you get in Oak Ridge?
MR. SHULTS: I interviewed - the main person I interviewed - of course you interview with several people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But the main one I interviewed was a man named Myron Kelley. Dr. Myron Kelley was the Director of Analytical Chemistry Division up here. And so I interviewed him and several of the supervisors in that division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And they made me an offer, and for the first time I began - I moved up here and lived in Tennessee, where my parents - where my ancestors had come from.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: Kind of interesting.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you said this was '51?
MR. SHULTS: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: '51.
MR. SHULTS: The training I had had at Emory didn't prepare me to come to Oak Ridge National Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: No, it was - they taught us conventional chemistry. So for example, if you wanted to measure a liquid you slurped it into a tube and you let it out to a mark and then you let it go. That tube is a pipette. When you come up here, I found there's no slurping in Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so I had to relearn - I had to learn for the first time how to do a lot of things, how to deal with small, tiny amounts of materials and how to handle radioactivity and live with it, and so on. So the first job I had was assigned into a radiochemistry lab which didn't have very much work to do. And I practiced all day long pipetting and that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? Right.
MR. SHULTS: Well, after about three months in that job, as I said, they didn't have anything much to do at that time. So I finagled around to get an interview with the Division Director, a meeting with him, and looking back at it, that was maybe a dangerous thing to do, but I went to him and I told him, "Dr. Kelley, we don't have very much work to do, and I'd just like you to know that if you'd like to move me to another group then I'd be pleased to go."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: Well, about three days later I got moved. He moved me over to a lab in Homogenous Reactor experiment. There was a little analytical laboratory in the building that supported that reactor development, and that was a big project at the Lab at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: It was a shift work job, but that's okay; I didn't even think about that in those days. So that was my job, was to run samples in that lab in support of their experiments at the reactor. And that resulted in the most exciting time I ever had at the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: Because I happened to be at work the night the thing first went critical.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: And so it was really exciting. I mean they had worked for years, several years building and they were going - it was a proof of concept that night, and they had a lot of big wheels come. And there was a guy named Winters who was a vice president of something at Union Carbide who came and he sat at the control panel and over the PA system and he would say "Raise control to notch two" or something like that. And it would, and you could see the radio-activity levels going up on a chart.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And it would go up and it would go back down. And he'd say, "Raise it to level four" and it would go up higher, and they would take the control rod out and it would go back down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And finally it went up to some level and it went up there and they took the control rods out and it kept operating.
MR. MCDANIEL: It just kept - oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: That meant it had gone critical right then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: And there was all this whooping and hollering going on. And I remember Alvin Weinberg brought champagne out, then completely illegal, but there was a celebration. And man, I'm telling you, that was an exciting night.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'll bet. I'll bet it was. I'll bet it was.
MR. SHULTS: And that was, as I said, probably the most exciting thing that happened to me out there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now when you first came to Oak Ridge in '51, now where did you live?
MR. SHULTS: I lived on Waddell Circle in a K-apartment.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. SHULTS: Oh yeah. In those days, you know, we had a guy come in and stoke the furnace in the middle of the night.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: You put cheesecloth over the vents so that the soot didn't blow out too badly in the rooms and things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But it wasn't bad for a newly married couple.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And we enjoyed living there. And it was not a bad neighborhood then. It's kind of gone down since then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Now where is Waddell?
MR. SHULTS: It's up, you know where the Children's Museum is?
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
MR. SHULTS: Okay. It's down towards Pennsylvania Avenue, about a block or two from there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. I understand.
MR. SHULTS: Just past Hillside.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, right. Exactly. I know where those - I know where that would be.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. And that was an okay place until I got drafted.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, tell me about that. So you were here - you got here in '51 and you worked here for how many years?
MR. SHULTS: Well, part of the reason I came up here was because I thought I wouldn't get drafted, that's the first thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: But when the Lab decided it was no longer going to request deferments for people, they didn't just decide and start doing it that way; what they did is they wrote the draft board and said, "We no longer need this guy." So I was gone in about a month, and that was in 1955.
MR. MCDANIEL: '55.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, they --
MR. MCDANIEL: So you'd been here almost - about four years or so.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, 3.5 or so years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. SHULTS: It was in March, March 15th actually. And that was another change in my life, to say the least.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. And you were, I mean, you know, you weren't just some guy right out of high school that went into the service; you were married and had a career and you were well into your 20s.
MR. SHULTS: Well, I didn't have any kids. Yeah, we were married, but I didn't have any kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: And so it was kind of an interesting time. They sent me down to Fort Jackson for basic training. And the result of that was I got orders to report to Denver, Colorado. I'd never been west of the Mississippi. I was standing around saying, "Holy mackerel, I'm going to Denver." Then somebody else says, "Are you nuts? That's a wonderful place."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And it was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. SHULTS: You know, those 2 years, 2.5 I spent in the Army were terrific.
MR. MCDANIEL: Were they?
MR. SHULTS: They really were. I worked in a nerve gas plant --
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. SHULTS: -- that was operated by the Army.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: Doing chemical work. And not much work actually. The plant didn't run very much, for one reason or another, broken down most of the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: Though I had - there were some scary times in there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, there really were. When you went in and out of the cells where the machinery was you had to put on a rubber suit and go through a shower to get in there and get out. And a guy, one of the Army people, private probably, bent over to pick up a wrench, and some dropped down his - the back of his rubber suit.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh goodness.
MR. SHULTS: And of course you shoot him with Atropine and do the best you can and rush him off.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: He was in the hospital about three months and then discharged.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Ruined.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness.
MR. SHULTS: But I said it didn't run much. I'm beginning to get wound up here, Keith.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.
MR. SHULTS: You're going to have to slow me down.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's okay.
MR. SHULTS: Since it didn't run much, and since I was working nights a lot of the time, a couple things happened that were great. One is I started playing golf, and that's my main game.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And the other thing is that we got to tour all around the West.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Not just around the Rocky Mountains there, which we did often, and go look for ghost towns and all kinds of things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But I took a 30-day leave and we hit every national park out west while we were out there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: I would've never had that kind of experience if I'd just stayed at work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: And so I look back on my Army days as great days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now did your work in the Army benefit you as far as your skill goes, your chemical [skill]?
MR. SHULTS: Not really.
MR. MCDANIEL: Not really?
MR. SHULTS: Uh-uh.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: It was strictly, I was like a technician in a lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: Technician, sure. Now when you finished your tour of duty what happened? Did you come back to Oak Ridge?
MR. SHULTS: Yes, I did. Now I did interview a few places. Rocky Flats was one of them actually.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. SHULTS: But I came back to the Lab. The Lab had saved a job for me. It wasn't exactly the same job, but it was a good job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I came back and I was in what's called a development group; it's sort of a research group.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now what year did you come back, '50?
MR. SHULTS: '57.
MR. MCDANIEL: '57, okay.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were in a development group there at the Lab.
MR. SHULTS: There's one thing, I guess a slight diversion, but I said I started playing golf. About 13 days before I was supposed to be discharged I was playing golf on the Fitzsimmons Army Hospital Golf Course, and had a heart attack.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: And I was 27 years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my goodness.
MR. SHULTS: And in those days heart attacks were a lot more serious than they are today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: That's not to say they're not.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But they didn't have the same skills and knowledge then, so I wound up spending three days out of - they put me to sleep to let me rest, in an oxygen tent for three days, before I ever woke up. When I woke up I had three golf balls in my back pocket all that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh my.
MR. SHULTS: And the nurse said, "You sure are fragrant." But I came back to work and I've had a very normal life.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do they know what caused it?
MR. SHULTS: No. One of the physicians brought in a book, a medical book, and in it it says heart attacks occur to people over 30 years old, and I was 27.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, of course. Twenty-seven.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: What do you think caused it? Do you think it had anything to do with your work?
MR. SHULTS: No. It was a fluke. I think everybody has some blood clots floating around in their system and, you know, the coronary arteries are really, really tiny. And so it wouldn't take much. And I just think it was a fluke.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just a fluke.
MR. SHULTS: But I had good doctors here and in Knoxville, super doctors.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you came back after your heart attack, after you got discharged, came back to Oak Ridge to work, and you were telling me you got put in a development group, which is kind of a research group.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah, I did. And that's another landmark event, I guess I would call it, because in that group there was a man that was sort of my hero; my boss was named Paul Thomas, and he was a very likeable, easygoing, but very competent guy. And so he's sort of my mentor.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I got to do development work and research and I got to write papers and reports. And that's not always the case; that was very fortunate. That was a blessing in a way.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: Well, after I'd been in that group for five or six years, one day I got a call to Dr. Kelley’s office. He said, "Have you ever thought about going back to school?"
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I said, "Well, sure." And they said, "Well, the AEC is developing a scholarship program and they're going to send people back to get their PhDs at no expense. I mean they're going to pay your salary and all this while you're gone, if you go. There's no guarantee that you'll get this, but we'll nominate you if you want us to."
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I said, "Of course." Now at this point in our life Sue and I had two - had one little girl, one was expected, and we were in our first house that we had bought. We lived in West Knoxville, West Hills.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: So I went home that night. This is a family story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Good. Good. That's - I'm interested in that.
MR. SHULTS: This is what I call Sue's finest hour, 'cause I went home that night, she's standing at the kitchen, washing dishes or something, and I go up behind her and she's pregnant, in our first house. And I say, "What would you say if I said we're going back to school?" She said, "Where are we going?" just like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Just like that.
MR. SHULTS: No problem. So we had to sell that house, but we didn't know for sure that we were going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so we put an ad in the paper and this retired couple came along and said, "We'll buy your house." And I said, "Well, there's a little problem, I don't know for sure that I'm leaving yet." And if you know how AEC and DOE works, it just delays and delays and delays.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I explained that to them and they said, "That's okay. We don't mind." And so about two weeks before we were to go I got called in and said, "Okay, you've been approved." And so we had to --
MR. MCDANIEL: Move everything.
MR. SHULTS: -- get going. We had to get going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: Now in the meantime we had gone off on interviews to different schools to make the decisions where we were going.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, where to go.
MR. SHULTS: And I had put a deposit down on student apartments up at Indiana - I went to Indiana University.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I had made all the arrangements anyhow.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So we jumped through the hoops, sold the house, packed up and moved to Bloomington, Indiana.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. SHULTS: And I was about 30 years, 31 years old. That was another landmark.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: I had been out of school about ten years and I was competing with guys who were ten years younger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. It was just the opposite of the way it was when you got out of high school, wasn't it?
MR. SHULTS: It was exactly. Well, almost exactly, yeah. Goodness gracious. And the first semester, was it - yeah, they were on the semester system at the time - I had to work pretty hard
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And in fact, I was dragging - I had to learn things that I had never had before. I had to be re-learning things and learning new things and things that those guys in the class had had last year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: On the other hand, I had ten years of experience too, so I had something going for me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. Sure, exactly.
MR. SHULTS: But after about three months there I was worried that maybe I'd made a bad mistake.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: Because I could imagine, "What if I flunk out?"
MR. MCDANIEL: That would be horrible.
MR. SHULTS: Having this scholarship, I won't be able to go back to the Lab; my whole life is ruined.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But it did work out and I wound up being very successful. And I came back to the Lab then and did my research at the Lab.
MR. MCDANIEL: For your thesis?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And so --
MR. MCDANIEL: And so what year did you come back to do that? You were there what, a year?
MR. SHULTS: It was about '62 I went - I think it was '62 I went up there, came back in '64, got the degree in '66.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: The postman delivered the degree for me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. We were living in the Garden Apartments, and by that time we had a third child on the way, and I didn't go up to any graduation.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And you've been here ever since, right?
MR. SHULTS: Yep, ever since.
MR. MCDANIEL: That was the last time you moved back to Oak Ridge, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: That's right. Yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, well good.
MR. SHULTS: And all the time I've been gone - the only time I - well, those assignments were one thing, but we did move to West Hills for one year out of that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But no, I'm an Oak Ridger, no doubt about it, through and through.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Well let's finish up kind of your career, and then I want to go back and talk about your community, your life in the community, in Oak Ridge.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you stayed at the Lab, you came back and got a job at the Lab. So kind of take me, you know, five or ten minutes and kind of talk about until your retirement.
MR. SHULTS: Well, when I came back I was in a research group again. But shortly after that they made me a group leader of another research group, kind of small. And we did some interesting things; we had a tobacco smoke program there that was one of the earliest ones in the country --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: --where we studied the chemicals in tobacco and tobacco smoke. And in conjunction with the people in the Biology Division, we studied the impact of that smoke. And when people saw what came out of those cigarettes it helped a lot of people quit smoking.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I bet. I'm sure it did. I'm sure it did.
MR. SHULTS: Although we had one technician in the program who never quit.
MR. MCDANIEL: Never quit?
MR. SHULTS: Golly. And I remember seeing him one day in the restroom, he came in and smoked a cigarette through a hole in his throat.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Oh my goodness.
MR. SHULTS: It was awful. So sometime, I don't know how many years now, but I was promoted up above, to what's called an Assistant Division Director. I guess I was Assistant Division Director first, and then I was Associate Division Director, and then I became a Division Director in 1976.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: I think. '74 or '76.
MR. MCDANIEL: The mid-'70s, something like that.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah. And that's where I was the rest of my life out there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. When did you retire?
MR. SHULTS: 1994, end of '94.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. So you were a Division Director about 20 years or so.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, almost.
MR. MCDANIEL: Almost, yeah.
MR. SHULTS: And it was a great job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. And I think I helped them, but they helped me too. I mean just being associated with ORNL is a plus in one's career. But I wound up being active in the American Chemical Society and I was head of its Division of Analytical Chemistry. ACS is the biggest professional society in the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. It has something like 130,000 members.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. SHULTS: And it's organized into divisions that are related to the discipline.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So there was one for Division of Analytical Chemistry, and I was head of that. And during - it's the usual things that people do, you know, I was on an editorial boards and things like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But I met and became friends with people, you know, all around the world.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, I got to do things that a railroad person wouldn't get to do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I was about to say you came a long way from that railroad job.
MR. SHULTS: Oh shoot.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let's go back and talk a little bit about your family and your life in the community of Oak Ridge. Let's start with when you came back, you know, the final time you came back to Oak Ridge, after you got your - you know, working on your doctorate. By this time you had three children, and I'm sure, you know, you kind of got entrenched in the community at that point, you know, started - of course, you know, when you have three kids there's not a whole lot of time between that and work. There's not a lot of time to do other things, but I'm sure you found some time.
MR. SHULTS: Well, one of the things that were big in our life at that stage was the Oak Ridge Civic Ballet Association.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SHULTS: I had two girls; they're older. The boy is younger.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. SHULTS: Both of them, both of the girls were in the ballet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? Okay.
MR. SHULTS: The civic ballet in Oak Ridge at that time was terrific, for a small town particularly.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so my wife and I both got into it. My wife made costumes and all of that stuff and wound up being chairman of their board for a year or two and things like that. My job, I worked on the productions.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you?
MR. SHULTS: In fact, was production manager for several of them. And I made sets and I made props and I did all kinds of things like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And I've told our girls, "You gave us a lot." I said, "We gave you something, but you gave us a lot too." That is another change in our lives. My kids grew up with an appreciation for music and for dance and things.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I was in several of them, actually. So you've got more performances than I do, but we've both been there.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's right. That's right.
MR. SHULTS: It's kind of funny, I think about this a lot, when we were going to do one, I think it was Coppelia, and they had the cast in position with a scrim in front, and you're standing there, knowing it's about to open, and you can't help but get a little bit nervous.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure.
MR. SHULTS: And a lot of funny things happened. And that was just the greatest thing, the greatest experience.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, Oak Ridge has always, from the beginning has always been - had really good cultural activities for its residents.
MR. SHULTS: It does. Yeah, it does.
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, the ballet and the orchestra and the Playhouse and things such as that, you know.
MR. SHULTS: Sure. It's amazing, isn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: It is amazing for such a small town.
MR. SHULTS: Well, the ballet - I don't - not very many small towns have a civic ballet.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh no.
MR. SHULTS: I know you can take ballet dancing classes and things. One of my daughters was very, very good. In fact, she competed at the state level. There was a ballet that celebrated the something-or-other anniversary of Knoxville, like the 200th or 150th anniversary or something. So she won the lead in that thing and she danced on the civic center stage in Knoxville.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Wow.
MR. SHULTS: But I had to learn a few --
MR. MCDANIEL: Can you pirouette?
MR. SHULTS: I had to - in one of my roles, in The Nutcracker, was the grandfather.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. SHULTS: Kind of funny too; I saw a picture of me made up for that role, looks like me today.
MR. MCDANIEL: Looks like you now?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny.
MR. SHULTS: But yeah, I had to learn a little dance step there for that one.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: And believe me, I practiced and practiced.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now were you all involved in any other activities like that? Or maybe not to that degree, but --
MR. SHULTS: That was the main one, main one. But my - well, my son, he didn't care for ballet too much.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: He actually was on stage one time, though. And after that, when he was 10 maybe, and as soon as it was over he says, "Dad, I'll never do that again." But he was on the golf team at the high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I was about to say, you're a big - you know, your love of golf, has it lasted through the years?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, we still play.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: I have a group that plays on Tuesdays and Thursdays when it can.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And we are not very good anymore. We never were really good, but we have a good time.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's beside the point, isn't it?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: Actually we've moved down now to play from what's called the forward tees, that's really the ladies' tees.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I told them the other day, "Man, we're getting to the point where we just - the only thing left is just to quit keeping score."
MR. MCDANIEL: Drive halfway down the green and tee off from there, I guess.
MR. SHULTS: Well, my son was on the golf team and he went to Tennessee Tech and he was on the golf team over there too. So one of the things we wound up doing was following him as much as we could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: One of the things in my life that's unusual, I will mention, related to golf, is that one of my brothers has four tickets to the Masters. He's had them since about 1965.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. SHULTS: And so I've been to every Masters for the past 40 years or so, except this last year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Really?
MR. SHULTS: This year - this year, in April.
MR. MCDANIEL: This year.
MR. SHULTS: And I couldn't go this year because I can't leave Sue for two or three days.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Sure. Sure, I understand.
MR. SHULTS: But that has been very unusual.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MR. SHULTS: They're hard to get.
MR. MCDANIEL: I bet.
MR. SHULTS: Those tickets are the hardest tickets to get of any sporting event.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MR. SHULTS: And we've been able to take friends and just have a great time doing that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, that's great. That's great. Now were you and your - was your wife involved in like groups or is she a member of the Bridge Club or were there organizations she was involved with over the years?
MR. SHULTS: She was primarily the ballet.
MR. MCDANIEL: The ballet.
MR. SHULTS: I mean it was a full-time job.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure. I know.
MR. SHULTS: And as I said, she was the chairman of their board for a while.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But, you know, we're Methodists and we're involved in the church to some extent. Probably not as much as we should be.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, nobody is probably. Now you did say that you all had seasons tickets to the Playhouse for a long, long time.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, we do that. We go to some of the symphony things, the music things, and up until this year, had season tickets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay.
MR. SHULTS: And we enjoyed that a lot. But we gave those up this year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well what was it like, you know, living in Oak Ridge and raising a family in Oak Ridge through the past few decades? I mean do you think it was different than any other place?
MR. SHULTS: I was about to say normal.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it?
MR. SHULTS: I think it - normal in the sense of experiences you have.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: Probably more than better in terms of loyalty or interest or something like the spirit maybe.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: You know, Oak Ridge is - it really is a different kind of place. I mean if you make half of an interest, effort, half, then you can have many, many friends; you can do just about anything you want to do. You're living in a place to be proud of it because it accomplished things of worldwide import. And you're around a lot of smart people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. SHULTS: I remember one night when we lived in the Garden Apartments, I went out to go to the car and here comes a Nobel Prize winner walking by, "Good evening."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: You know, it's kind of like a university environment almost.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: It was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: It was.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was.
MR. SHULTS: And so I was very proud of being in Oak Ridge and very proud at being at ORNL too, for that matter.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure. Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: But, you know, my wife, she didn't get out in all the clubs and things that she could have, but she did her part in other ways.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well sure, of course.
MR. SHULTS: But I seem to get elected to a lot of things. I kind of don't know how to say no enough.
MR. MCDANIEL: Mm-hmm.
MR. SHULTS: But I was president of the country club for three years and things like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Now you've been a long-time Rotary member, haven't you?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Well, about 24 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Twenty-four years.
MR. SHULTS: Mm-hmm. Yeah, the Breakfast Club - there are three clubs in town.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And I belong to the - and was president of that club for a while. And I'm treasurer now actually. But yeah, that Rotary Club is wonderful; it has been. Part of the reason it's wonderful is just the people in it. You get acquainted with people of all different kinds of jobs and interests and backgrounds and it's sort of a broadening experience actually just to be a member of that thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: But it also does a lot of good things for a lot of people around the world actually.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. And in the community, you know.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And the community as well as around the world.
MR. SHULTS: I didn't realize it would be so good when I first joined, but when my son graduated from Tennessee Tech it was just about the time that I got inducted into Rotary. And so Mary Lou Auxier, you interviewed - I think you interviewed John Auxier.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes.
MR. SHULTS: Mary Lou Auxier at that time is the one who sponsored me into Rotary.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. SHULTS: And in talking about me, introducing the new member, she says, "And just for your information, he has a son who is just graduating in engineering from Tennessee Tech, in case anybody has a job."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: After the meeting Chuck Hall, who was head of engineering for Martin Marietta came up and said, "Have him send me his resume."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: And that's how he got the job.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's just that networking that everybody talks about.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. It's amazing isn't it?
MR. MCDANIEL: You know, and people are willing to help, even without you asking.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I mean that's one of the great things about it.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, it is.
MR. MCDANIEL: But I think that's just kind of a reflection of our community, you know? I mean, you know, I would imagine that that kind of attitude in the Rotary, you know, just a reflection of the people in our community, you know.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah, Rotary, one of its goals is to get a mix of people of different professions, so you all learn it from each other and help each other out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. SHULTS: But that's a living example right there.
MR. MCDANIEL: It sure is. It sure is.
MR. SHULTS: So the nice thing is he stayed in Oak Ridge, and now I've got two little grandkids, one is seven and one is six, who live down the street from me one mile.
MR. MCDANIEL: You can't beat that, can't you?
MR. SHULTS: I mean that's about as good as it gets. So I mean I have friends whose grandkids live in Seattle and, goodness gracious.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But no, we get to know them and they get to know us.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. That's true. That's true. Anything else about your life in Oak Ridge that you want to talk about? Did you ever get involved in politics? Were you interested in that?
MR. SHULTS: Well, not to the level of others. But I was a member of the original Environmental Equality Advisory Board.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. SHULTS: I was the charter vice president on that thing.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right.
MR. SHULTS: And that - when it first got started that --
MR. MCDANIEL: And what did that do? What did that board do?
MR. SHULTS: Well, that's back in the '70s, when the environment got to be capitalized.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so this was a new board, supposed to represent the citizenry in environmental matters and advise the City Council.
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MR. SHULTS: And so I was involved in that in the early days. It still exists. I'm not sure, you know, exactly what all it does now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But it was --
MR. MCDANIEL: But you never thought of running for City Council or the School Board or anything like that?
MR. SHULTS: Not very long.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. I understand. You thought about it and then you got over it, right? Is that what it was?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess everybody thinks about that at some point, and then they realize.
MR. SHULTS: Well, you know, I appreciate those people doing that, and some of them are good friends of mine. And I'll help them in any way I can, but I really - sad to say, but when I was working I didn't really have time for that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure. Sure. I understand. I understand.
MR. SHULTS: You know, I guess maybe it sounded like pretty rosy when I was talking about my job and all, but you know, it was a 24/7 job.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. It was a good job, it was just very demanding, though, wasn't it?
MR. SHULTS: It was, yeah. You know, there were times when we would have a snow here and everybody would go home and I'd go out, you know, at 7:00 and the cars were still piled up, well, I just spent the night in the office --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: -- instead of trying to go home and come back.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right.
MR. SHULTS: But yeah, it was pretty demanding. I never did think of it much as a job really, though.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was just your life, wasn't it?
MR. SHULTS: It was indeed. That's the way it was. That's the same way my dad was about his job. I don't think my son is quite like that, but he's pretty conscientious, thank goodness.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right. Well, kids nowadays, you know, they have a different mindset, don't they?
MR. SHULTS: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Your son is probably close to my age, so I can't call him a kid probably.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah, he's 45.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, I'm a little older than him, so. But well, is there anything else you want to talk about? Anything else you want to tell? Any good stories you want to tell on anybody, 'cause here's a good chance?
MR. SHULTS: Really? Can I tell one?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure, absolutely.
MR. SHULTS: Well, I'm going to tell my favorite Clyde Hopkins story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. SHULTS: Clyde and I and --
MR. MCDANIEL: And for people who don't know, tell us who Clyde Hopkins is.
MR. SHULTS: Well, Clyde Hopkins was formerly the president of the Martin Marietta and then Lockheed Martin organizations in Oak Ridge. And at that time it was a unified single contract operation, so he was over Y-12, K-25, X-10, Portsmouth, Paducah, and so on.
MR. MCDANIEL: he was the big cheese, wasn't he?
MR. SHULTS: He was, and he's just a great guy, really, really great guy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And we've been playing golf together maybe for 50 years or so. And we used to go on golf trips. Every year we would go somewhere for three or four days, play golf and eat.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: And there was an engineer here named Frank Davis who went with us, and there's a lawyer over in Knoxville named Ed Rayson who went with us. Ed's a bit older than we are.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: So on one of these trips we went over to a place in North Carolina that's sort of a golf resort, and it's in Waynesville, North Carolina. And we had adjacent rooms; Frank and I in one, Clyde and Ed in the other. Now Ed had a little hearing problem; he had to wear hearing aids, which he took out at night.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So there we are, we'd sit around - we'd eat and we would sit around and shoot the bull and then go to bed early so we could get up and play the next day. Well, this night we all went to bed and asleep. And about 3:00 in the morning there's a knock on the door, knock, knock, knock, "Dub. Hey, Dub. Hey, Dub." And it - so I went and I looked through the little hole there, you know, and son of a gun, there's Clyde out there in the dark. Now you've got to picture this; it's dark, but right over him is a light shining down on him like a spotlight, see?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And he's standing out there in his underwear. And so I open the door and he says, "I can't get in my room." He said, "They called me from the office and said my lights were on in the car, and I came out" and he said, "Ed's asleep, he can't hear anything, so I need to get back in my room." And I'm telling you, that scene of Clyde Hopkins standing in the dark in his underwear with the light shining down on him, like from Heaven, I'm telling you, is hilarious.
MR. MCDANIEL: Excuse me. That is funny.
MR. SHULTS: And he paid the price, too. I'll tell you, it went around.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, that's kind of an unusual thing to think of Clyde doing; he's so distinguished, you know.
MR. SHULTS: Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you'll allow me, I'll tell you my best story about Clyde --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. SHULTS: -- since I've kind of made fun of him.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's fine. Go ahead.
MR. SHULTS: The Rotary Club - I have trouble telling this story. The Rotary Club each year has an angel trees; we pick angels and buy presents for little kids that are underprivileged.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: And so we did - Clyde and I decided -we gather on the Saturday before Christmas and deliver them.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: So we were delivering and one of the little kids had wanted a bicycle, and we had a whole - we had big garbage bags full of toys.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So we go up to this door and Clyde has this bicycle with him that the little kid wanted. And we knock on the door and they come and he said, "We've got this bicycle for you." Another little kid over there says, "I wanted one too."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Clyde says, "We didn't have room for that one in the truck. We'll have to bring it back later."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: He went directly to K-Mart, bought another bicycle, and took it back to that kid.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SHULTS: Now that is a moving story to me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: It says a lot about him, not as president of the company, but he's really a great guy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, good. Good. All right, are we through?
MR. SHULTS: I guess we are, if you don't - you've run out of questions.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, no, no, no. If you've got anything else you want to talk about we can. If not, then that's great; we've been going about an hour.
MR. SHULTS: Well, let me just say this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, go ahead.
MR. SHULTS: When this opportunity came up, as I said a while ago, you can't help but do a little reflection. And when I think back, my life has sort of been a series of things happening at just the right time. It seems like things just fell together for me. You know, I got drafted, but it turned out to be good.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: You know, I had a heart attack, but it turned out to be okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: I got sent back to school- it's unimaginable that I got picked as one of the first three guys to get sent back to school at company expense.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. SHULTS: My major professor up there used to tease me about being the highest-paid graduate student in the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MR. SHULTS: But things just fell together, it seems. So I just feel like I've had a good life. Really good. And living in Oak Ridge is part of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Sure.
MR. SHULTS: So thank you for doing this.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well thank you very much. I appreciate it and it was great to hear your stories.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[*** Editor’s Note: At the request of Mr. Shults, several corrections have been made to this transcript; however, the video/audio component to this interview is unchanged.***]